Harry Reid: How Dare You Be Optimistic About Iraq
Don’t you know it’s devastating for his political agenda?
Democrats are increasingly bailing on their previously held view that the troop surge in Iraq has been a “failure,” but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid isn’t ready to jump on the bandwagon with other Democrats who say the surge has worked.
The Senate re-opened for business on Monday after a two-week Thanksgiving break, during which key Democrats traveled to Iraq and declared that the surge is working, at least from a security and military perspective. Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), one the top war critics, stunned fellow Democrats late last week with his statement that “the surge is working,” even though he added that political reconciliation has been lagging. Murtha’s view was backed by Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), who also said the surge worked after he returned from Iraq.
But Reid, in a Monday press conference, ceded no ground.
“The surge hasn’t accomplished its goals,” Reid said. “... We’re involved, still, in an intractable civil war.”
Troop deaths plummeting. Iraqi deaths plummeting. Factions across Iraq joining forces to fight against foreign terrorists. Some 300,000 Iraqis, including 600 Shiite tribal leaders, signing a petition to condemn Iran for that country’s meddling in the war. All of that, and more, and Reid still can’t stop talking about the “intractable civil war” in Iraq. Something made all the worse by the fact that he’s not saying it because he actually believes there’s an “intractable civil war” going on in Iraq but because admitting that he was wrong about the war is a politically untenable position for both himself and his party.
You’ve got to give him credit for one thing, though. It takes a special kind of dishonest lout to look out upon the public and issue a straight-faced lie of that magnitude.
